7. Serial and tonal works 1920–36.

Since serialism is a method of composition and does not dictate style, Schoenberg might have been expected to find in it the means, if not of completing Die Jakobsleiter, at least of continuing in some direction suggested by that work. Instead he evolved a form of neo-classicism. This may not have been his original intention. The Klavierstücke op.23 nos.1, 2 and 4, written or begun in July 1920, are descendants of the pre-war instrumental pieces, and exactly a year later he began the Suite op.25, also for piano, with the only two movements (the Prelude and Intermezzo) that are not dance movements, thinking of the work simply as a second set of pieces. However, the Variations and Tanzszene from the Serenade op.24 had been begun in the later months of 1920, the March followed in September 1921, and by the time all three works were finished in the early part of 1923 movements based on Classical forms predominated. Although every piece in opp.23 and 24 involves serial procedures, only one in each work uses a 12-note series. Both of these postdate the earliest movements of the Suite, which, like nearly everything that Schoenberg was to compose in the next ten years, is dodecaphonic throughout.

The reason for Schoenberg’s return to Classical forms must be sought in his need to find new scope for his inherently developmental cast of thought. Paradoxically, developing variation had brought about, above all in the later works of 1909, a reduction in the conditions for its own exercise. Where every motif is transformed before it can gather associations for the listener there can be no intensification of meaning through development; where no pattern establishes itself only extreme contrasts cheat expectation, and then not for long. If Schoenberg’s art of development was to develop further it needed a basis in relative stability, especially in the rhythmic sphere. For him technical needs were inseparable from philosophical ones. It seems likely that he saw his music at this time as initiating a new incarnation analogous to that required of the ‘chosen one’ in the second part of Die Jakobsleiter. In the second turn of the spiral of his musical existence his task was evidently to reinterpret, in accordance with the ‘higher and better order’ to which he aspired, not his own previous experience, but the course of musical history as he knew and understood it best. His real interest began with Bach. He later declared his teachers to have been in the first place Bach and Mozart, and in the second Beethoven, Wagner and Brahms. Although the last two had appeared as the dominant influences in his tonal music, at least on the surface, the earlier ones now came to the fore. Despite the reluctance of the ‘chosen one’, like Moses after him, to return to the world and prophesy, Schoenberg was able to write to Hauer in December 1923 that after a 15-year search he had discovered a method of composition that allowed him to compose with a freedom and fantasy such as he had only known in his youth. The next 13 years were remarkably fruitful.

Most of the movements in the Serenade and the Suite draw on late Baroque dance characteristics much as Pierrot lunaire had borrowed from the subjects that it parodied. But although the detail of the Serenade often recalls Pierrot, as does its humour, six of its seven movements are built on an altogether larger scale, even without the lengthy repeats that Schoenberg adopted from his models. The repeats, here and in the Suite, are the first of any size and almost the last in the whole of his published work. They set him the special problem of canalizing his transforming imagination sufficiently within a given mood and character for a repetition to make sense. The exercise was no doubt an essential step towards establishing strongly differentiated developing characters in the great instrumental and operatic structures of the coming years. But that was incidental: Schoenberg said that he never knew what lay ahead, and his zigzag course towards the crises of 1908 and 1920 bears him out. There is nothing merely preparatory about the early serial masterpieces: his concern was, as ever, with the unique work in hand.

Thus in the marvellous series of instrumental works composed between 1920 and 1936 individuality is not of the limited kind associated with stepping-stones in a stylistic or technical evolution. In each one vigorous expansion within the terms of a particular premise builds a self-sufficient statement of very wide range, yet entirely singular. The next two works, the Wind Quintet and the Suite op.29 for seven instruments, illustrate the point very clearly. Schoenberg turned here to the thematic contrast required by Classical forms and to the traditional four-movement pattern. The first movement of the Quintet follows standard sonata layout, and the finale is a rondo. The first movement of the Suite lacks a regular development section, but despite the dance character of the second and fourth movements consistent symphonic treatment allies it with the Quintet rather than the Serenade. Yet the two works differ radically. The persistent contrapuntal texture of the Quintet looks back to the First String Quartet and the Kammersymphonie no.1 (and the emphasis on whole-tone and quartal sonorities is reminiscent of the latter work); the Suite is rooted in a harmonic idea which pervades texture and melody throughout. The divergence affects the music at every level.

In the Variationen für Orchester (1926–8) and the Third String Quartet (1927), which are also modelled on Classical forms, Schoenberg avoided these contrapuntal and harmonic extremes for the most part, and finally established the main stylistic characteristics of his serial music; these were to remain fairly constant to the end of his life. The transformations of the series as such cannot, of course, be followed consistently by the ear, and he strongly deprecated any attempt to do so. Although for him the series functioned in the manner of a motif, his themes consist primarily of rhythmic patterns which may carry any serial derivation. The thematic rhythms themselves are not fixed: he showed remarkable skill in varying them without endangering their identity. The interplay of melodic and rhythmic motif is responsible to a very large extent for the extraordinary richness of the music, bringing about in the course of a work the gradual accumulation of a mass of affinities between disparate elements. It also affects the bar-to-bar texture in an important way. The prodigious contrapuntal combinations so typical of the tonal works lose ground to relatively simple textures in which one or two salient lines predominate. But the rhythmic articulation of accompaniments fashioned out of serial forms in balanced succession or combination produces a wealth of motivic reference, as well as the play of rhythmic wit that is such a notable feature of Schoenberg’s later scores. Thus the superimposition of ideas, with its risk of overloading, gives way to a finely graduated perspective in which listeners discover with increasing familiarity ever more layers of meaning beyond the clearcut foreground, as their hearing travels towards the inaudible vanishing-point of ultimate serial connection.

At the end of 1928 Schoenberg drafted the first version of the text of Moses und Aron (in the form of an oratorio) and composed the one-act comic opera Von heute auf morgen. The subjects of both works had been anticipated three years earlier in the two sets of short choral pieces opp.27 and 28. Most of these make considerable use of strict canonic or fugal writing, a feature that is taken up on a greatly expanded scale in the ensembles and choruses of the operas. The Drei Satiren op.28 deride the irresponsibility of modish modernity in music (especially Stravinsky’s neo-classicism); Von heute auf morgen attacks the same thing in life. This is a comedy of marital strife and reconciliation involving a symmetrical quartet of characters: a wife brings her husband to heel when he takes an interest in an emancipated ‘woman of today’ by showing that she could play the same game if she wished. The little incident, which Gertrud Schoenberg with her husband’s assistance turned into a very serviceable libretto, was suggested by the domestic life of the Greissles, according to documents among the Greissle papers, although the librettist told Leopoldina Gerhard that the Schrekers were the model. The text makes its points bluntly, like most that Schoenberg had a hand in or wrote himself: his musical style is not primarily illustrative and prefers a simple basis for the wealth of comment and interpretation that it provides in its own terms. The opera adopts Classical procedures, but handles them rather freely. Recitative and arioso break into the set pieces, expanding them to accommodate great flexibility of pace and feeling as the bickering characters waver between good sense and self-indulgence. Schoenberg finds no broad comedy in the commonplace and absurd situations, but endless nuances of humour and sentiment which, no less than the extremes of spirituality and depravity in Moses und Aron, relate to perennial components in his expressive range.

It was another 18 months before Schoenberg finally began to compose Moses und Aron. In the meantime he produced several smaller works in which the relation to Classical form becomes looser. The first piano piece of op.33 and its slightly later companion (1931) each employ a pair of contrasting themes, but the first, at least, recalls the concentrated manner of op.23. At this time he became interested in the problem of film music. Unwilling to subordinate his music to the requirements of a real film he chose instead to illustrate in his Begleitungsmusik zu einer Lichtspielszene an imaginary and unfilmable sequence of emotions: threatening danger, fear, catastrophe. He employed a kind of free variation form, and thinned out his recent style considerably to suit the programmatic nature of the undertaking. Since 1916 Schoenberg had now and then used tonality in fragmentary sketches and occasional pieces (notably the beautiful Weihnachtsmusik of 1921 based on Es ist ein’ Ros’ entsprungen), but never in published works. In 1929, however, he made some folksong settings for a commission, and followed them up with two non-dodecaphonic male choruses, Glück and Verbundenheit, the second of which centres on D minor. Although the other four choruses that make up op.35 are dodecaphonic, the exceptions show that the urge to return to tonal composition was beginning to gain ground.

Moses und Aron, composed between 1930 and 1932, is Schoenberg’s second great profession of faith, a sequel to Die Jakobsleiter dealing with the predicament of the chosen one in carrying out his prophetic task. Unlike the oratorio, however, the work is in no real sense unfinished, even though the short third act was never set to music. The reason for this lies in the subject itself. At the beginning of Act 1 God, speaking from the burning bush, assigns to Moses the role of prophet. Schoenberg had summed up the problems of revelation without distortion in the second chorus from op.27: ‘You shall not make an image. For an image confines, limits, grasps what should remain limitless and unimaginable. An image demands a name which you can take only from what is little. You shall not worship the little! You must believe in the spirit, directly, without emotion, selflessly’. Moses complains that he lacks eloquence to express what he understands of God, who accordingly appoints Aaron as his spokesman. Aaron comes to meet Moses; he echoes Moses’s thoughts in less uncompromising terms, and this is underlined by the casting of Moses as a speaker and Aaron as a lyric tenor. They return together to bring the demoralized but expectant Israelites news of the new god who is to deliver them from Egyptian bondage. Moses tells them flatly that the one almighty, invisible and unimaginable God requires no sacrifices of them but complete devotion, and meets with a derision that Aaron can quell only by performing a series of three miracles, thereby substituting an image for the truth.

In Act 2 Aaron is obliged to still the people’s doubt when Moses is away praying on the mountain by setting up a real image for them to worship in the form of the golden calf. The healing benefits of a faith so shallowly grounded are soon swept away by an orgy culminating in human sacrifice, suicide, lust and wholesale destruction. When Moses returns the calf vanishes at his word, but Aaron is able to defend his actions by pointing out that he is Moses’s interpreter, and not an independent agent. The people are seen following yet another image, this time the pillar of fire, and Moses is left in despair. The uncomposed third act consists of another exchange between the brothers. This time Moses prevails. Aaron, who has been under arrest, is freed but falls dead; with all barriers to spiritual understanding removed the people will at length achieve unity with God. Schoenberg once suggested that Beethoven, Bruckner and Mahler had not been permitted to compose tenth symphonies because they might have revealed something that we are not permitted to know; a ninth seemed to represent a limit beyond which the composer must pass into the hereafter. To have composed music adequate to the idea of unity with God would have been to write a tenth symphony. At some level Schoenberg must have felt this from the outset, for the first two acts of the opera are dramatically and musically complete in themselves. But to remain true to his mission he could not admit that: it was his duty to continue to strive towards the expression of the inexpressible. To the end of his life he still spoke of finishing the work.

In its formal procedures Moses und Aron follows Von heute auf morgen in striking a balance between Classical number opera and Wagner’s continuous symphonic manner, but on a far larger scale incorporating very big choral or orchestral movements. Schoenberg draws on every aspect of his music of the previous decade, and in the partly spoken texture of much of the choral writing looks back further. It is in every way his most comprehensive masterpiece, encompassing the stillness of the purely spiritual glimpsed momentarily in the opening bars, Moses’s bitterness and resignation, Aaron’s ecstatic eloquence and occasional weakness, and the people’s jubilation, instability, mockery, violence and outright savagery. And it is noteworthy that the music interprets the stern morality of the libretto with a breadth of sympathy lacking in the neutral words.

That Schoenberg should now have sought relaxation in a less monumental task is not so surprising as his choice, which took the form of a pair of concertos for cello and for string quartet, based respectively on a keyboard concerto by M.G. Monn for which he had provided a continuo part some 20 years earlier, and Handel’s Concerto grosso op.6 no.7 (the only one of the set that lacks separate concertino parts throughout). These works are often mistakenly classified as arrangements. However, whereas in his orchestrations of Bach and Brahms Schoenberg added nothing substantial to the original and never overstepped the style, the concertos are new compositions to almost the same degree as a set of variations on another composer’s theme. Thus in each movement of the Cello Concerto he overlaid Monn’s exposition with additional counterpoints and harmonies reaching as far forward as Brahms, or even later, and then continued independently in the same style. In the Quartet Concerto he preserved the complete outline of the original first movement and scarcely changed the second; on the other hand he radically recomposed the two remaining movements, taking only a few phrases from Handel in the third. In 1934 he crowned this group of works with a Suite in G for string orchestra in a similar style but based entirely on his own material. By way of indicating their secondary status he did not confer an opus number on any of them, yet they are brilliant compositions that he could certainly not have written earlier. The pressures towards the dissolution of tonality that haunt his older tonal works are entirely absent; the late works accept their terms of reference, and the clarity with which their abundant invention is projected derives directly from the serial works of the previous decade.

The one aspect of Schoenberg’s serial music for which Moses und Aron had given only restricted opportunity was its abstract symphonic thought. This now became his chief concern again. After his tonal excursion he composed in 1935–6 the Violin Concerto and the Fourth String Quartet, his first 12-note works (apart from the three songs of op.48) since the opera, and with it the culminating productions of this period of his work. They are cast in the respective three- and four-movement moulds traditional in such works, but the individual movements abandon strict Classical layout. The first-movement recapitulations no longer correspond to the measure of the expositions, but are engulfed in the development, which continues unchecked to the close. The forward urge that marks all Schoenberg’s music asserts itself so forcefully here that a return to single-movement structure through the breakdown of the divisions between movements might have been foretold. Such a return did indeed take place, but the transition was not a straightforward one.

Schoenberg, Arnold